CAIRO — Seven years later, it remains conventional wisdom here that Osama
bin Laden and Al
Qaeda could not have been solely responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11,
2001, and that the United States and Israel had to have been involved in their
planning, if not their execution, too.

This is not the conclusion of a scientific survey, but it is what routinely
comes up in conversations around the region — in a shopping mall in Dubai, in a
park in Algiers, in a cafe in Riyadh and all over Cairo.

“Look, I don’t believe what your governments and press say. It just can’t be
true,” said Ahmed Issab, 26, a Syrian engineer who lives and works in the United
Arab Emirates. “Why would they tell the truth? I think the U.S. organized this
so that they had an excuse to invade Iraq for the oil.”

It is easy for Americans to dismiss such thinking as bizarre. But that would
miss a point that people in this part of the world think Western leaders,
especially in Washington, need to understand: That such ideas persist represents
the first failure in the fight against terrorism — the inability to convince
people here that the United States is, indeed, waging a campaign against
terrorism, not a crusade against Muslims.

“The United States should be concerned because in order to tell people that
there is a real evil, they too have to believe it in order to help you,” said
Mushairy al-Thaidy, a columnist in the Saudi-owned regional newspaper Asharq al
Awsat. “Otherwise, it will diminish your ability to fight terrorism. It is not
the kind of battle you can fight on your own; it is a collective battle.”

There were many reasons people here said they believed that the attacks of
9/11 were part of a conspiracy against Muslims. Some had nothing to do with
Western actions, and some had everything to do with Western policies.

Again and again, people said they simply did not believe that a group of
Arabs — like themselves — could possibly have waged such a successful operation
against a superpower like the United States. But they also said that
Washington’s post-9/11 foreign policy proved that the United States and Israel
were behind the attacks, especially with the invasion of Iraq.

“Maybe people who executed the operation were Arabs, but the brains? No way,”
said Mohammed Ibrahim, 36, a clothing-store owner in the Bulaq neighborhood of
Cairo. “It was organized by other people, the United States or the
Israelis.”

The rumors that spread shortly after 9/11 have been passed on so often that
people no longer know where or when they first heard them. At this point, they
have heard them so often, even on television, that they think they must be true.

First among these is that Jews did not go to work at the World Trade Center
on that day. Asked how Jews might have been notified to stay home, or how they
kept it a secret from co-workers, people here wave off the questions because
they clash with their bedrock conviction that Jews are behind many of their
troubles and that Western Jews will go to any length to protect Israel.

“Why is it that on 9/11, the Jews didn’t go to work in the building,” said
Ahmed Saied, 25, who works in Cairo as a driver for a lawyer. “Everybody knows
this. I saw it on TV, and a lot of people talk about this.”

Zein al-Abdin, 42, an electrician, who was drinking tea and chain-smoking
cheap Cleopatra cigarettes in Al Shahat, a cafe in Bulaq, grew more and more
animated as he laid out his thinking about what happened on Sept. 11.

“What matters is we think it was an attack against Arabs,” he said of the
passenger planes crashing into American targets. “Why is it that they never
caught him, bin Laden? How can they not know where he is when they know
everything? They don’t catch him because he hasn’t done it. What happened in
Iraq confirms that it has nothing to do with bin Laden or Qaeda. They went
against Arabs and against Islam to serve Israel, that’s why.”

There is a reason so many people here talk with casual certainty — and no
embarrassment — about the United States attacking itself to have a reason to go
after Arabs and help Israel. It is a reflection of how they view government
leaders, not just in Washington, but here in Egypt and throughout the Middle
East. They do not believe them. The state-owned media are also distrusted.
Therefore, they think that if the government is insisting that bin Laden was
behind it, he must not have been.

“Mubarak says whatever the Americans want him to say, and he’s lying for
them, of course,” Mr. Ibrahim said of Hosni
Mubarak, Egypt’s president.

Americans might better understand the region, experts here said, if they
simply listen to what people are saying — and try to understand why — rather
than taking offense. The broad view here is that even before Sept. 11, the
United States was not a fair broker in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and that it
then capitalized on the attacks to buttress Israel and undermine the Muslim Arab
world.

The single greatest proof, in most people’s eyes, was the invasion of Iraq.
Trying to convince people here that it was not a quest for oil or a war on
Muslims is like convincing many Americans that it was, and that the 9/11 attacks
were the first step.

“It is the result of widespread mistrust, and the belief among Arabs and
Muslims that the United States has a prejudice against them,” said Wahid Abdel
Meguid, deputy director of the government-financed Al Ahram Center for Political
and Strategic Studies, the nation’s premier research center. “So they never
think the United States is well intentioned, and they always feel that whatever
it does has something behind it.”

Hisham Abbas, 22, studies tourism at Cairo University and hopes one day to
work with foreigners for a living. But he does not give it a second thought when
asked about Sept. 11. He said it made no sense at all that Mr. bin Laden could
have carried out such an attack from Afghanistan. And like everyone else
interviewed, he saw the events of the last seven years as proof positive that it
was all a United States plan to go after Muslims.

“There are Arabs who hate America, a lot of them, but this is too much,” Mr.
Abbas said as he fidgeted with his cellphone. “And look at what happened after
this — the Americans invaded two Muslim countries. They used 9/11 as an excuse
and went to Iraq. They killed Saddam, tortured people. How can you trust
them?”

Nadim Audi contributed
reporting.

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»A version of this article appeared in print on September 9, 2008, on
page A16 of the New York edition.